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Edits by Starspotter

I really hate to do this, but I feel I need to raise the question of whether the edits to Star Trek-related articles by Starspotter (talk · contribs) are ultimately a net positive to this project.

Per the above thread, I just reverted many of their edits in which they added information about how a reviewer considered epsiodes to be "must-watch"...more than half of the episodes from DS9 and ENT, which ultimately rendered the "must-watch" desgination essentially meaningless as an indicator of significance. These edits were made very quickly, without edit summaries, and presumably without consulting with this project (or anyone else) first. In their defense, they haven't edited for the past two weeks, so they may not have been aware of the discussion, but I question whether there should have been a need for that discussion to begin with.

Since the beginning of this year they've multiple warnings regarding their edits to Star Trek-related articles, including canvassing with regards to an AFD.

I have concerns about many of their other edits, primarily regarding the reception of episodes, but I simply don't have the bandwidth to review all of it.

While Starspotter has made many contributions to Star Trek-related articles that are likely beyond reproach and that have improved the quality of said articles, I'm nevertheless left wondering how long it will be before they next make problematic edits that it falls to other members of this community to discuss and potentially clean-up.

@Starspotter: I'd love to get a response from you on this to the effect that you understand the concerns I've established here and that you will a) be more careful to provide edit summaries (which you have also been advised about in the past) and b) will consult this project proactively before making large-scale edits to multiple articles. If you're unwilling to agree to these two requests, I would feel forced to ask whether a topic ban might be appropriate to prevent further disruption. I don't feel that these are significant asks, but if you do, I'm happy to discuss further. I hope it's understandable that it's uncomfortable when your evidently well-intentioned edits nevertheless place other editors in the role of needing to either ask you to self-revert or take on the task of unwinding your edits themselves.

Thank you for your thoughts on this. DonIago (talk) 04:15, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

I get that you feel he is creating a maintenance burden and you feel a certain obligation to fix it.
Do I wish he was a bit more discerning about his sources, yes, very much so but I do believe his edits are made entirely in good faith and on balance more good than bad. -- 109.79.161.157 (talk) 18:37, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
I believe Starspotter means well, but well-intentioned conduct that's nevertheless disruptive at some point stops being a net positive, and asking them to stop by here before making edits to a large number of articles isn't IMO imposing a major burden. Nor is asking them to be more diligent about using edit summaries. DonIago (talk) 22:13, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
It is certainly fair to ask for edit summaries, and certainly wise to ask before making mass changes (or changing stable Featured articles) but I have not yet seen anything to suggest a ban, that seems like an extreme measure and at most a distant prospect. I hope Starspotter is taking a voluntary break and will be a bit more cautious when he returns. -- 109.79.161.157 (talk) 22:30, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
I'd definitely prefer it not go as far as a topic ban (I haven't seen anything to suggest they should be banned from WP entirely, though I do have concerns), but if they're unable or unwilling to edit more thoughtfully going forward, then I'm more worried about the problematic edits we won't catch than the ones we've caught. DonIago (talk) 03:46, 2 July 2021 (UTC)
Starspotter for me is a prolific editor whose contributions, whether constructive or rough, kind of run together in my head. That probably has more to do with my diminished participation in Misplaced Pages the last few years. In other words, I can't offer much specific feedback on their behavior. But, from a cursory look, I see a lot of engagement on their talk page from multiple editors with nudges toward slowing down, being more thoughtful/deliberate about sources, and (reading between the lines) defining the distinction between Misplaced Pages and Memory Alpha. (Huh: I've provided three rounds of feedback along these lines in his four years of editing.) It looks like Starspotter responds with a combination of "okay, got ya!" and "I didn't hear that". Everything about his edits scream "big fan doing their best to edit in good faith."
I wonder whether Starspotter would be open to some kind of mentorship. Or maybe plucking one of the articles they're interested in improving into Draft: space (if that's appropriate) and going to town on it with feedback on content and style from the rest of the project. The latter might be a good sandbox to provide feedback in a way where the feedbackers are not saying, "Oh, geez, I need to go revert or ask them to revert a bunch of edits across 20 episode articles" or some such. A chance to work through style and sourcing kinks in one place before running wild on the rest of the project.
Invoking a topic ban seems to be jumping the gun. There's more to your original post than just that phrase, but it stands out to me -- and I worry invoking it might distract from your goal of ensuring Starspotter receives and responds to feedback and contributes positively. Starspotter seems to have been away for a couple of weeks (six days before your latest pair of talk page posts, and 14? since starting this thread). So, DonIago, one thing I'd put on your plate is to just check/ask where your stress/anxiety level is at when you see Starspotter's name in your watchlist. (FWIW, this curiosity came to mind because I saw NadirAli's name while scrolling Starspotter's talk page and I had a pang of anxiety remembering how challenging it was for me to log in and see a bunch of their edits.) I don't really have a question here or advice, so just got dot-dot-dot let the ellipsis close this out ... --EEMIV (talk) 01:47, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
Fair enough. I've struck that part of my original post alluding to a topic ban. I certainly don't want it to come to that, and I hope nobody else does either, but I do feel that I've seen enough questionable editing from Starspotter that I am inclined to subject their edits to heightened scrutiny, especially when they're frequently made without summaries. Really, just slowing down and letting other editors know what they're doing, especially when it involves mass-editing, would probably be a win for everyone. DonIago (talk) 02:26, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
I'm also one of the editors that has that has asked Starspotter to be more thoughtful on their talk page. They always thank editors for their words, and I think they do make a conscious effort at being more thoughtful. Whenever an editor reverts one of their Starspotter reviews, they never reply with any kind of edit warring or back and forth reverting. Starspotter, IMO, operates from a purely good faith space, and is obviously a fan, reading about episodes and posting reviews they think are relevant. That said, Starspotter is a work in progress and still has some "tempering" needed to decide which reviews are noteworthy and from a good source. I cannot support any kind of ban.
I think one of the reasons we as other Star Trek editors are "tired" of this is because when Starspotter stumbles upon a new source of ST reviews, they tend to visit 20 or so episodes in rapid fire succession adding these reviews. If other editors feel that the source is not good, you have to revert 20 or so edits - which can easily get on your nerves. I would suggest a mixing of EEMIV's mentoring suggestion and ask Starspotter that when they find a new source, just post on one ST article. Let the other editors see it and, if it stands as a worthy source, come back in a few days and add to other ST articles. But give us a chance to see these reviews and have a discussion about the source's legitimacy on just one article. Less work and headache for everyone involved. StarHOG (Talk) 13:04, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
I'd be fine with that. Generally, they simply need to be more collaborative and/or less proactive about mass-edits. DonIago (talk) 15:03, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
While we are on the topic of collaboration and communication, I felt that the previous discussion ended a bit prematurely and if it had gone a little further it might have set a better example for the future.
Clearly there was agreement that the particular "must watch" list articles were low quality and a problem, but there was no further discussion about what action to take. It wasn't clear that DonIago was going to ask StarSpotter to revert/remove the references (but I did notice that DonIago added a note about that on StarSpotters Talk page). I would not have predicted that DonIago would then take on the burden of doing it all himself, in a relatively short matter of time. It all seems a bit rushed, and if the discussion had gone on just a little longer, and the intention had been made clearer in advance, and a bit more time given, DonIago need not have taken the burden (and any annoyance he might be feeling) all on himself. For example, I could have offered to go through all the Enterprise articles (which I'm slowly doing anyway, adding Nielsen ratings mostly) and helped to remove the low quality references from that group of articles. Sharing the burden might avoid editors getting "tired" of dealing with similar problems.
So in the future if there is a problem, it would be great if we could continue the discussion a little longer to include suggested solutions, and maybe divide and conquer when it comes to taking action. -- 109.78.204.208 (talk) 21:24, 4 July 2021 (UTC)
Sorry if I didn't "close the loop" on the previous thread as well as I might have. When nobody responded for over a week after I said it looked like we had a consensus, I rather took that as people agreeing to roll back the edits in principle but not quite having the bandwidth to get into the work of it. I ended up having that bandwidth, and there wasn't (and still isn't) any indication as to if or when Starspotter will return, so I decided it was a good time to unwind them before more edits were made to the articles in question and further complicated any reversion work. As it is, I'm not certain I got all of them. DonIago (talk) 01:48, 5 July 2021 (UTC)
It seems to have annoyed you enough to kick off this discussion, it would have been fine otherwise. In any case, you didn't miss much and I'm sure we will get to them as we notice them. -- 109.79.68.55 (talk) 14:54, 5 July 2021 (UTC)
109: This was the straw that broke the camel's back. As other editors have mentioned, Starspotter has been advised multiple times to slow down and be more thoughtful. At some point...and I'm not saying we're at that point...AGF gets strained to the breaking point and we transition from "maybe this time they'll take our advice to heart" to "we need to consider taking steps to stop further well-intentioned but significantly disruptive editing". Cheers. DonIago (talk) 17:07, 5 July 2021 (UTC)
I strongly suggest holding off on further discussion of this topic until Starspotter has a chance to speak. They don't seem to be active right now and I, for one, would be upset if I came back from a hiatus and found a week of people talking about me! StarHOG (Talk) 13:26, 6 July 2021 (UTC)
Agreed. I left a notification on their talk page pointing them over here for when they return. --EEMIV (talk) 01:46, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

Did you know?

I was thinking that with the 20th anniversary of Enterprise coming up in September it might be nice to get a "Did you know" entry to highlight it and I'd like to run it past editors interested in Star Trek before proposing it. Here's a rough draft of what I was thinking of suggesting: 

Did you know: The opening credits of Star Trek: Enterprise used the U2 song Beautiful Day as a temp track before the song Faith of the Heart was chosen. The series premiered September 26, 2001.

The website of Montgomery and Co, the company that created the title credits, contains a video of the credits including the U2 song. Archive Copy (which does include a working copy of the video) Brannon Braga also mentioned this on the Bluray commentary.

  1. Did you know this already?
  2. Do you think it is interesting?
  3. Can you suggest a different alternative or better way to highlight Enterprise on Misplaced Pages before this September?

This is something I didn't know until recently and I added it to the article Star Trek: Enterprise. I think it is interesting and a little controversial because people love to hate that theme song. I don't know if there is another better way to sneak in the secondary message that Enterprise turns 20 this September.

Thanks. -- 109.79.161.25 (talk) 12:18, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Notification: Class M planet at AfD

Just want to let those interested know that Class M planet is nominated for deletion and discussed here. Daranios (talk) 18:42, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

Was there not a page for this already somewhere? (Maybe there was no relevant Misplaced Pages page and I was thinking of the Memory Alpha page for Class M planet.) I see the above version was only newly created on 25 July 2021‎ by User:SnappingTurtle. I'm not sure there's enough for a separate page. Maybe SnappingTurtle has a plan to do more with it (such as explaining M for Minshara) but moving it to DRAFT until it is more substantial might be good idea. Thanks for keeping us posted. -- 109.79.177.180 (talk) 01:35, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
Update, it has been relisted. Randy Kryn (talk) 02:46, 2 August 2021 (UTC)
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